#TakeapartTuesday – Eva Murray

I have limited time at the moment, so when time management is critical you have choices including delegation and prioritisation. Recently I’ve been submitting my own #MakeoverMonday, then taking apart other submissions for #TakeapartTuesday, and then battling with #WorkoutWednesday.

Work has rudely interrupted that flow of Tableau immersion, so this week I’m just going to combine the first two parts of my Tableau week as I rebuild Eva‘s visualisation in the way this #TakeapartTuesday series began – by not referring to the original work until I get really stuck. It may mean that it doesn’t qualify as my own #MakeoverMonday and I drop out of the 100% club for 2017, but I can deal with that – I already have the T-shirt!

This is what we’re aiming for:

Nice and neat. I don’t really care for American Sports, so the March Madness whooshes straight over my head. Eva’s approach was to focus on the finals only and to highlight the years in which lower ranking teams caused an upset by beating their higher ranked opposition. I really like the simplicity of this chart, and it’s the “call outs” that interest me in particular.

Starting with those squares, it seems easy enough:

We can tackle those Year labels in a bit. Let’s check out the [Upset?] calculation:

Easy. The best seed is ranked #1, so any instance where the Winning Seed is higher than the Losing Seed is indeed an upset. To sort the issue with the Year Header, I just hid the header, and then created a calculation:

Setting the alignment to Centre and Top, with colour matching the Mark gave me a good enough result:

The key part of this #TakeapartTuesday was going to look at, or be inspired by, the “call out” boxes. Here I depart from Eva’s path, as while I like that she has annotated two specific National Championship games, I wanted to see if I could use tooltips to dynamically create a similar looking sort of call out, but only for all of the “upsets”. So where a user hovers over a grey year (in which a favourite won the title), nothing at all is shown.

Ultimately I couldn’t recreate the aesthete, but here’s what I did to get the intended functionality:

It’s busy looking, but all basic stuff. Essentially I wrote a series of calculations prefixed with the statement IF [Upset?] THEN….. Therefore, where it was a National Championship game and the result was an Upset, then pull through the second part of the calculation. So we have loads of stuff like this:

It’s a bit of a faff, but it has a purpose. By separating the Winners from the Losers, I could then apply the relevant colour to that teams’ data. It’s not as engaging as Eva’s visualisation as it obliges the user to interact to take away more detail, but it was a nice exercise nonetheless to practise creating “selective tooltips”. Plus, has there ever been a less tall dashboard on Tableau Public?